We're on a Historic Communications Mission - Join Us!
When the NIA was first established in 2015 we had one mission: to educate service providers about the ins and outs and intricacies of a relatively new and highly promising technology called NFV. But it very quickly became apparent from industry feedback that we needed to expand the scope of our mission.

Over the last two years, at the request of our service provider membership, the NIA has expanded its role to cover not only NFV, but also SDN. And we view both of these technologies as underlying enablers of the next great phase of communications: the automation of service provider networks and services - an area in which NIA is investing significant resources in 2017.

To make it easier to understand the NIA's mission, we have created the following six-part manifesto, referred to by the acronym 'STRICT*' for Strategy, Taxonomy, Repository, Interoperability, Community, and Testing.

NIA STRICT:

• STRATEGYNIA's over-arching mission is to provide service providers and carriers around the world with the information and analysis required to formulate profitable virtualization business strategies for the 21st Century.

• TAXONOMYThe NIA is this year working with the world's leading communications companies to create the industry's first comprehensive hierarchical taxonomy of next-gen communications - a unique and exhaustive blueprint that will simplify and accelerate the design and construction and monetization of virtualized networks.

• REPOSITORYWe are engaged in the creation of an online database, or repository, of 'standardized service models,' written and donated free of charge by the world's leading carriers. These models allow service providers to take advantage of the business benefits of virtualizing services without having to wrestle with the underlying complexities of the NFV infrastructure technology.

• INTEROPERABILITYThe lack of interoperability between the VNFs being developed by application developers on the one hand and incumbent suppliers of NFV infrastructure on the other represents the current greatest impediment to the development of an open and burgeoning NFV market. NIA is this year addressing this crisis by developing a de facto industry standard for NFV interoperability, and accompanying certification, based on work already produced by industry organizations.

• COMMUNITYA key objective of the NIA is to provide a moderated venue through which members of the communications industry can share ideas, interact with one another, and even debate the strategies and tactics for driving forward network functions virtualization.

• TESTINGIn only two years the NIA has established a peerless reputation for conducting the most reliable and advanced independent laboratory evaluations of NFV technology from leading vendors, including service chaining, and VNF management. Our next test takes place in Q4 2017 and comprises a unique industry evaluation of the state of NFV/SDN integration.

"BT supports VNF-NFVI interoperability testing by the NIA. We are concerned with the growing diversity of NFVI and specializations that limit the portability of VNFs. This growing diversity leads to increasing operational complexity and costs."

-- Peter J. Willis, Chief Researcher, BT --

"The Cloudification of Network Functions and the change in our production models is probably the biggest transformation ever hitting the Telco industry. In a world build on Open Standards and Open Source, testing and integration remains a major effort - an independent entity like NIA driving this can deliver huge value to us as network operators and our vendors."

Unless you've been living in North Korea for the last couple of years you will have noticed Cisco Systems has undergone a pretty major techno-cultural shift. Cisco's big-name telco legends of yore (Pankaj Patel, Kelly Ahuja) are gone, and the vacuum they left is being filled by enterprise cloud folk.

In Building the Network of the Future, AT&T executives explain how they foresee the transition to software-defined networking (SDN), a cornerstone of which is the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) that AT&T has been instrumental in founding.

What a difference a year makes! At last year's SDN and OpenFlow World Congress in The Hague, there were a number of presentations highlighting the fact that NFV was in the doldrums or trough of disillusionment, including my own presentation.

At Light Reading's recent OSS in the Era of NFV/SDN event in London, I moderated a panel discussion on "Analytics, Machine Learning & AI in Next-Gen OSS/BSS" and wanted to share some key insights from the speakers:

LONDON -- OSS in the Era of SDN & NFV -- Some operators are now making money on the back of SDN and NFV deployments, and the ones that have achieved that fiscal goal are the service providers more focused on business strategies than on technology, according to Netcracker's Ari Banerjee.

LONDON -- OSS in the Era of SDN & NFV - The proposed "zero touch" networking industry group that is set to be formed under the auspices of ETSI has attracted a range of high profile potential members and has the support of Sprint, says the Deutsche Telekom executive who is spearheading the initiative.

By this point, you may already be growing tired of the automation hype cycle. That's too bad, because as hype cycles go, this one is just getting started. By this time next year, you'll probably be feeling nostalgic for simpler days, when NFV was the leader of all hype, with 5G running a reasonably close second.

The current hype around connected cars is old hat to Formula 1 racing team McLaren-Honda and technology partner NTT Communications. They are gearing up to handle nearly 100GB of transmitted data from the McLaren race car at the US Grand Prix in Austin this weekend.